HBO says oops

George W. Bush’s fake severed head on Game Of Thrones has, quite inevitably, sparked some very real furor from Republicans, including some who have done more than just fill out a standard “liberal media cesspool” blog template or post comments about how HBO obviously stands for “HAIL BARACK OBAMA.” Some of them, like Brooklyn Republican Party chairman Craig Eaton, have even called for a total boycott of the show that he also admits he’s not familiar with, not that he has any “plans to tune in any time soon.” And that sort of rational, considered criticism has already prompted swift apologies from both the network (“We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste,” HBO said while making a sad face, to show how dismayed it is) as well as showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who acknowledged that they probably just shouldn’t have said anything about it in their DVD commentary, while reiterating that stabbing George W. Bush’s decapitated head on a spike was a matter of convenience, not a political statement.

“We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc.,” their apology reads. “We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk.” As we said yesterday, if movie prosthetic suppliers would only stop padding out their orders with the filler that is severed Bush heads, perhaps this whole second of screen time for the blurry, half-glimpsed, shrouded profile of a rubber copy of a controversial former president would be a non-issue. But, because prop companies use Bush heads the way, say, Gardetto’s Snack Mix uses pretzels, HBO has been forced to have the head removed from all future DVD copies. This, of course, has instantly created a market for Game Of Thrones: Severed Bush Head Edition collector’s items, which is a far more respectful situation than just letting this whole thing play itself out.